Since the invention of the stethoscope, physicians and other health care workers have used lung acoustics to assist in the diagnosis and analysis of the health ills and abnormalities of patients. Typically, less experienced medical personnel gain practical experience in the art of auscultation by listening to the heart and lung sounds of live patients.
Of course, patients are not always available to assist in the teaching process. Consequently, teaching apparatuses have been developed wherein recordings of actual patient respiratory sounds are used to train medical personnel in auscultation. However, current teaching tools which utilize previously recorded sounds suffer from the disadvantage that playback environments cause considerable distortion in the sounds that they reproduce. To those using such tools, the reproduced respiratory sounds do not “sound” as if they are being generated by a live patient. Moreover, the distortions may make it difficult for the listener to hear and/or interpret the subtleties of a recorded respiratory maneuver.
In addition, the diagnosis of respiratory problems often involves the identification of a specific component of a respiratory maneuver. As such, it would be desirable if specific sound components could be isolated from recorded respiratory maneuvers so that only those components are audible during playback. However, this cannot be accomplished using current state-of-the-art teaching apparatuses.
Thus, there exists a need for a new and improved system for training health care workers in auscultation.